Over a slight rise a few minutes from Whiteclay and I’m already on the outskirts of the village of Pine Ridge, population four thousand, de facto capital of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Off to my right is a BIA housing project: signature wood-frame dwellings depressingly painted in subdued pastels—pale peach, chalky blue, toxic green, fading marigold—with much too much bright white trim. The windowless doors, front and back, open onto dirt yards. There are no windows on the sides of these houses; only a small window or two in the front and one in the back. Some of the yards have a few shrubs and small patches of grass or gardens, and most are filled up with old, parked cars and trucks, two or three or up to a dozen or more, as I’ve been told rez folks like to keep old clunkers around for spare parts. Believe it or not, these BIA houses are new—freshly painted, no broken glass, no apparent fire damage—and they are nicely positioned near a stand of evergreen spruce trees. By Pine Ridge standards, this neighborhood is upscale; I imagine that the people living here work for the tribal government.
Straight ahead is the “Pine Ridge 4-way,” the only four-way traffic light on the rez. Here highway SD-407 intersects with Pine Ridge’s main street, which is actually another highway, U.S. 18, one of the Midwest’s first paved roads. Lightly traveled these days, U.S. 18 was an important route before they built the Interstate System. It was opened in 1926 to connect the breweries in Milwaukee with all the thirsty people out West in South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, and Northern California. And looming to my left is an enormous, bright-red-and-white Conoco gas station, home of Big Bat’s, one of the weirdest combination café–convenience store–tourist stop–local hangouts ever conceived. As I turn at the intersection and into the station, past the gas pumps, my eyes are drawn above the front entrance to an avant-garde metal sculpture of three fierce warriors on horseback charging forward—feathers and horsetails flying behind—looking as if they are about to overrun the 7th Cavalry. Next to this “corporate trademark” is a bigger, even bolder Big Bat logo. And just below these images, nearly as conspicuous, a message in sun-bright yellow type on a blue background reads:
Waves of Change
There are at least a dozen parked cars and trucks around the place; some obviously clean tourist rentals, others unwashed forever, belonging to the locals. Extracting myself from Villa VW, I am greeted by extremely loud country music coming from outdoor speakers, which must originate from KILI Radio, the Voice of the Lakota Nation, an FM station perched on a nearby bluff overlooking the little village of Porcupine. Everybody on the rez listens to KILI. When it isn’t broadcasting local news and gossip alternatively in English and Lakota, indigenous music, or born-again religious banter, it plays country music. I can’t believe my ears—Charlie Daniels belting out “The South’s Gonna Do It (Again)”! I don’t know why Indians like this shit, but the lyrics “Well you can be proud” follow me into Big Bat’s cavernous dining area with its sloppy mix of round wood, square wood, and rectangular Formica tables, and a long horseshoe-shaped counter in front of the food preparation area where you can order from an immense menu of hamburgers, sandwiches, onion rings, hot plates, bean soup, ice cream, sodas, and Indian fry bread. The shelves are neatly stocked with junk food and souvenirs, but what most catches my attention inside Big Bat’s are the story murals that wrap their way along the top half of the walls and ceiling; murals that illustrate for anyone who cares to know the complexity and beauty of Lakota spiritual mythology, mythology every bit as meaningful and poignant as that which has stirred human imagination since the dawning of civilization and probably for many millennia before. Beings from all cultures, forever curious, seek answers to probing questions about their world, beginning with questions about human origin and the origin of the stars, the oceans, the land, and the myriad other creatures with which we share this universe. The result is creation stories, stories difficult to understand without science and the scientific method, and even then. Using visual literacy and oral tradition to teach Lakota mythology to Lakota children is a powerful way to counterbalance the absurd colonial notion that white people, and particularly Christian white people, have a lock on religion and thereby cultural correctness and knowledge. Among the Brulé, who are related to the Lakota, origin starts with a great flood, when the first people were attacked by Unktehi, the Big Water Monster, who sent the waters to kill them. The people climbed a steep hill to escape, but still the water immersed them and they drowned. The remaining pool of water turned to blood, which became a quarry from which the surviving people made sacred red stone pipes. These pipes had great power because their smoke represented the breath of the ancestors. After the flood, Unktehi turned into stone and became the Badlands. Only one person—a young girl—survived the flood, having been picked up by Wanblee, the eagle, and flown to Wanblee’s home in a tall tree. The girl became Wanblee’s wife, and from their union came two pairs of twins, one set male and the other female. These were the parents of the Brulé people, who take pride in being known as the “Eagle People.”
When I was fired after my first year in Kyle, Linda landed a position teaching high school sophomore English in Wanblee, thirty-three miles west of Kyle, where we lived in a leaky two-room trailer with our infant daughter, Mara. Strangely enough, Vernell too moved to Wanblee, starred on the Crazy Horse basketball team, and continued to be our best Indian friend. The Wanblee creation story is the first of many on the walls of Big Bat’s; another tells how a young Lakota warrior captured and tamed the first horse, how people acquired the flute, and, most important to the Lakota and many related tribes, of White Buffalo Calf Woman’s gift of the peace pipe—my favorite of all Lakota legends, and in my opinion the most beautiful. When I was teaching in Kyle, I memorized and recited this tale to all my classes, and I still can recall much of it.
During a time of winter hardships and starvation, two young warriors leave the camp in search of buffalo. They wander for many days not even seeing hoofprints, and are about to give up when they see the ghost of a beautiful young woman dressed in white buckskin walking toward them. She carries what looks like a stick wrapped in a bundle of sage. So struck by her, one of the men declares he is going to make her his wife, but the other man objects, saying that she is holy, that it would be wrong to claim her.
But his friend does not listen. He runs up to the beautiful woman and tries to hug her. At that very moment, he disappears with her in a violent whirlwind reaching high into the sky. When the whirlwind stops, the woman is still standing as before with the bundle in her arm. The man, however, is now a pile of bones.
Too afraid to run away, the surviving warrior stares at her. She speaks to him: “Go back to your camp and tell your people I will soon be there to meet with a good man who lives among you. His name is Bull Walking Upright. Tell your people to pitch their tepees in a circle, leave an opening that faces north. In the center of this circle, place a large tepee, also facing north. This is where I will meet with Bull Walking Upright.”
Relieved that he too is not going to be turned into a pile of bones, the man runs as fast as he can back to the camp. The people listen to him and follow all the instructions. When White Buffalo Calf Woman meets with Bull Walking Upright in the center tepee, she unwraps her bundle and gives him the gift of a small pipe made of red stone upon which is carved the tiny outline of a buffalo calf. This is the sacred pipe. She teaches him the prayers he should recite to the Strong One Above. “When you pray to the Strong One Above,” she says, “you must also use the pipe. If the people are hungry, unwrap it and lay it bare in the air. The buffalo will then come where your warriors can easily hunt and kill them.”
White Buffalo Calf Woman slowly turns and walks out of the tepee. With all the people watching her in awe, she lies down on the ground and rolls over and over. When she stands up, she is a black buffalo. Again she lies down, rolls over and over. This time she rises as a red buffalo. The third time, she is a brown buffalo. The fourth and final time, she takes the form of a spotless white buffalo. In this form she walks into the distance and disappears.
There are all kinds of people inside Big Bat’s—three or four chunky truck drivers from faraway places devour cheeseburgers; a bald tourist stands at the deli counter and orders a submarine sandwich with the works, and I can’t help but notice his open Hawaiian shirt, his camera with a much too conspicuous zoom lens and high-powered binoculars awkwardly suspended from his neck. A group of Lakota teenage boys wearing Oakland Raiders jerseys and backward caps sit sloppily at a far corner table swearing and laughing. They toss French fries at each other, make loud squeaks scooting their chairs, and dare anyone to object. Nearby sit two young women, towheaded Germans, much too stylish for this place, oblivious to stares. Opposite the unruly boys in the other far corner is a drunken man who must have popped in from Whiteclay. He stares into his coffee, and I have a feeling he is going to be here for a very long time. Most striking, though, is a table of old Lakota men; one in particular catches my fancy, the one with a large-brim cowboy hat wearing two worn but classic polo shirts, with suspenders holding up his blue jeans—a good thing because they sag below his portly belly. His raccoon eyebrows rise above the upper rim of his glasses as he skeptically looks over at me to convey the message You definitely not fooling anyone, white man. The other two glance my way as well, so I meekly wave and say, “Hi, there.” Poker-faced, they go back to their conversation. Only then do I realize that they must have thought I was trying to listen in to their subversive talk, as I hear one of them say “Keystone Pipeline.” Naturally, I look downward and focus as hard as I can on what they are saying. One phrase is crystal clear, and it warms my greedy little green heart: “The people will never allow the pipeline; they will block the bulldozers.” Once I dare to look up again, I notice that there is no coffee or food on their table; they are simply having a strategic meeting. I wonder, do they come to Big Bat’s every day to plot counterrevolution?
In the midst of the junk food I spot a rack of so-called “healthy choices”: peanuts, sunflower seeds, gluten-free cookies, cheese sticks, and something called Tanka nutrition bars, which look similar to granola bars. Picking one up and reading the label, I learn that Tanka bars are made on the reservation, that they are a combination of smoked buffalo meat and flavor additives including apple, orange peel, and spicy pepper. And I see that they also have Tanka jerky and Tanka trail mix. Unfortunately, Big Bat’s does not carry Perrier or Dinty Moore—for that I’ll have to try the nearby Sioux Nation Shopping Center. So I select a few Tanka bars and walk up to the counter, where on impulse I ask the cute girl behind the cash machine, “Why is this place called Big Bat’s?” She shrugs, turns, and points her finger at a giant middle-aged man wearing an elegantly embroidered yet dog-eared cowboy shirt and chatting with the cook, and says, “That’s Big Bat. He’s the owner.”
“Can you tell him I would like to introduce myself and ask him about this place?”
“You’re not the FBI, are you?” she jokes.
“Hell no. You kidding? I lived near here. I’m on my way to Kyle to visit my friend Vernell White Thunder. Do you know him?”
“I don’t know no Vernell.”
Much louder than the occasion requires, she shouts out, “Hey, Big Bat. This white dude wants to talk to you!”
When Big Bat looks at me, I notice his facial features—green eyes and cocoa complexion, pointed nose, narrow chin, and thin eyebrows. More European than native. He smiles, motions me to sit at an empty table, and ambles over to join me. Extending a bear paw hand, he says, “People call me Big Bat; my real name is Tye, Tye Pourier. Suppose you want to know about this place, right?”
“Good guess,” I answer. “I lived in Kyle long ago, was in Pine Ridge many times, but back then there was nothing like Big Bat’s. I love this place, but how did it come about?”
Proud and convivial, Big Bat tells me the business was started in 1990 by his parents, who wanted a place for people to gather; in Lakota, a “tiyospaye,” an extended family place where anyone can come to eat decent food and talk, stay as long as they want, a place that reflects the generosity and beauty of Lakota culture. They named it “Big Bat” after his great-grandfather, a famous French trader originally from St. Louis who married the sister of Oglala chief Smoke and became a trusted member of the tribe. The original Big Bat could speak fluent Lakota and was friends with Chief Red Cloud. He also knew all the other chiefs and went on many hunting trips and even on pony raids against the Crow. Big Bat was present when Crazy Horse was stabbed to death at Fort Robinson. When Big Bat wasn’t riding with his warrior friends, he traded beads, cooking pots, hunting rifles, and bullets for beaver pelts and buffalo hides. To get more inventory for his trading post, and to sell the pelts and hides, Big Bat routinely rafted down the Missouri River all the way to St. Louis—an arduous twelve-hundred-mile journey—and returned by pack mule.
“My great-grandfather never sold alcohol,” the younger Big Bat says. “In 1996 a terrible kitchen fire, never should have happened, burned down this whole frickin’ place, right to the ground. We rebuilt it, made it bigger and better. Big Bat is no joke; for us it is a road map to the future. We come from a warrior culture; my grandfather and father were warriors, and I too am a warrior. Business is today’s battlefield.”
“And when did you become ‘Big Bat’?”
“When my dad opened Big Bat’s, people thought he must be Big Bat, so they started calling him Big Bat, and he accepted this. When I took over, I became Big Bat, and when my son takes over, he too will be Big Bat.” He paused and nodded slowly.
“I guess there will always be a Big Bat.”
* * *
Before leaving Big Bat’s, I pause to look across the highway in utter disgust at the Pine Ridge Agency, official BIA headquarters housed in an anemic redbrick building, once occupied by imperial-minded bureaucrats who thought God had put them on earth to annihilate Indian culture. Something must be going right, because these days the agency is just a stopover for unhappy government employees who spend most of their time filling out transfer forms to better places—say, the Great Plains Regional Office in Aberdeen or, better yet, the Northwest Regional Office in Portland. I imagine how worthless they must feel as they try to maintain the fiction that they are in charge of something, that they still matter. To many, the agency is a symbol of past oppression and failed policies such as the Indian Removal Act, which forced people onto reservations; the Dawes Act, which reduced the size of these reservations by more than half; and the 1956 Indian Relocation Act, which moved people back off the reservation into cities, where they found only more poverty and despair.
The agency itself is an unsightly structure except for one thing—positioned near the front entrance is a sweet memorial to thirty-one Lakota soldiers from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation who died during World War II, their names etched in marble next to the date of their deaths: Albert Chief Eagle, Mar. 14, 1943; Floyd Bear Saves Life, June 6, 1944; Lester Red Boy, Nov. 17, 1944; Clement Crazy Thunder, Mar. 11, 1945; Chester Afraid of Bear, April 8, 1945; Earl Two Bulls, Nov. 30, 1944; and so on. Like all Indians, the Lakota are tremendously proud of their soldiers. As a proportion of their population, by far more Native Americans serve in the armed forces than any other ethnic group, remarkable considering that the U.S. Army exterminated so many. More than ten thousand native men volunteered to serve during World War I despite the fact that most were not U.S. “citizens” at the time and were unprotected under the Constitution. In fact, it was not until after World War II with the 1965 passage of the Voting Rights Act that all states were required to allow Native Americans to vote on the same basis as any other American. Despite decades of persecution and broken promises, despite being dispossessed of, and often forcibly removed from, their ancestral homelands, American Indians served and continue to serve in our nation’s armed forces in numbers that belie their small percentage of the American population.
* * *
To get to the Sioux Nation Shopping Center, I have to drive only a short distance past Billy Mills Hall, where funerals, powwows, and important community meetings are held. I once met Billy Mills, years ago when he came here for the dedication of this building. In 1964, when he pulled off one of the greatest upsets in Olympic history, I was a junior in high school, glued to my TV set. I already knew quite a bit about him because he twice led the Kansas University cross-country team to a national championship, and because he was from Pine Ridge. Mills was the Jim Thorpe of his day, but there was no way he was going to win the ten-thousand-meter run. World record holder Ron Clarke, who had the advantageous inside lane, was figured to win going away. Billy’s best time in the ten thousand was ten seconds slower than Clarke’s—if anyone was to give Clarke a race, it wouldn’t be Mills but Kōkichi Tsuburaya from Japan or Tunisia’s Mohammed Gammoudi.
Yet, in fourth place with three laps to go, Mills was within striking distance. Tsuburaya took the lead, and the home crowd went wild; Clarke was boxed in—Gammoudi in front, Mills to his right. When Clarke tried to elbow Billy out of the way, it looked for a moment like Billy would stumble, but just then Gammoudi charged between Clarke and Mills and into the lead. Tsuburaya began to fade. Clarke passed Gammoudi—things were just as they were supposed to be; Clarke would win for sure. But then came Mills. Swinging wide to the outside, he put on a burst of speed the likes of which had never been seen before in distance running. When he surged past Gammoudi and Clarke, I could not believe it, nor could the announcer, who famously yelled, “Look at Mills! Look at Mills! Look at Mills!” The whole country was transfixed, and at that moment, Mills became a genuine American hero.
When I heard Billy Mills speak, an inebriated heckler interrupted him, yelled out, “I’m going to burn this place down because it is named after you.”
“Please don’t burn it down,” Mills said. “Just change the name.”
* * *
A few feet past Billy Mills Hall, I pull into a parking lot in front of the biggest, ugliest building on the rez, a mass of cinder blocks painted vomit yellow. The sign
Sioux Nation
Shopping Center
Hardware Meat Produce
is matter-of-factly painted in garish fluorescent-orange letters on one end of the building next to an amateurish mural painting of an eagle, peace pipe in its claws, swooping down on a green valley where there are two or three tepees. Similar to many prisons, the Sioux Nation Shopping Center has no windows. You can’t see the entrance because it is around the corner of a false brick wall, making it awkward to get in and out of the place; a deterrent, I suppose, to shoplifting. I park on the far side of the lot, move my camera from the seat to the floor, get out, and saunter across the gravel surface. Several local people are around, but no one seems to take note of me, not even the stray dogs hoping for handouts.
Inside, the Sioux Nation Shopping Center looks like any urban grocery store: shopping carts, checkout stands, aisles of packaged food, and shoppers scurrying about. Everything is neat, tidy, clean, and well lighted, and I think, Why shouldn’t it be? Ahead is the drink aisle, more than half its length occupied by every brand of oversized soda you can imagine, but sadly no Perrier; they used to carry Perrier, and Vernell won’t settle for less. Perrier is sort of a running joke between us. At least they have Dinty Moore beef stew, so I stash a dozen cans in my cart and look for other things he might like. I’m so focused on reading labels, I nearly run my cart into an elderly Indian woman, a weathered grandmother, rock of the Lakota world, who has surely seen more than anyone’s share of hard times. Two small children, a boy and a girl, stand in her grocery cart eating Oreo cookies from a package. The children don’t object when she gently takes the package from the little girl’s hands and puts it back on the shelf—they’ve had their treat. No need for Grandmother to buy this, and I certainly don’t blame her; Lakota grandmothers are the primary caregivers of many children, a tradition in a culture where many teenage girls have babies, where many parents drink away their miseries and are too incapacitated to raise kids. They say over half the children on the rez live with their grandparents, and it is a good thing, or more would be snatched away to the do-gooder orphanages and foster care agencies, and in some cases adopted overseas.
Six aisles of canned food seems out of proportion to the tiny frozen food, produce, and fresh meat sections. You might get the impression that Indians just like eating stuff out of cans, but there is a more insidious reason; nearly a third of their homes don’t have electricity, and people have long forgotten the old ways of smoking meat, storing dairy food in cold streams, and burying root vegetables under the earth. Produce at Sioux Nation is limited—iceberg lettuce, a few wrinkled tomatoes, strawberries on the edge, moldy spinach, limp carrots, old corn—nearly all would have been tossed in the Dumpster where I shop back home, but here it stays on the shelf until it is so green no one even looks at it. I spot a FRESH MEAT sign above a refrigerated display case stocked with packaged steaks and hamburger in front of the in-store butcher shop. The meat seems fresh enough, but there is a disturbing bulletin posted nearby, alerting customers to something I didn’t know about; it explains why hamburger is sometimes grayish brown on the inside even if it is red on the outside. “Oxygen from the air,” it reads, “triggers a pigment in hamburger called ‘oxymyoglobin,’ which gives it its red color. Because the meat beneath the surface is not being exposed to oxygen, it is sometimes grayish brown. Only when ‘all the meat’ in a package is grayish brown do you have to worry that it ‘may be beginning to spoil.’”
I catch the attention of the presumed butcher, a young, approachable Indian man with happy eyes, a plump face, and a ponytail hanging to the middle of his back. I ask him about the sign. He smiles, says, “People around here really like their hamburger, but they don’t understand why the meat isn’t red all the way through. They try to bring it back, or worse, they complain to the tribal council. We only want to educate them.”
I can’t help but remark, “I don’t like it when my hamburger is brown.”
“We sell a lot of hamburger here; it is really, really fresh.”
“Where do you get your hamburger?”
A little less friendly now, Butcherman moves closer, puts his hands on top of the counter, stares at me. “It comes frozen from the meat-packer in Omaha. We thaw it out.”
I can’t help but press on. “Why don’t you buy it from local ranchers?”
“Too expensive. Where you from, anyway?”
I tell him I once taught school in Kyle, shopped here many times, but I don’t remember any problems about the hamburger.
“Well,” he adamantly replies, “you should know that this store is important to the people. So what if some of our hamburger isn’t as red as the hamburger you can get wherever the hell you live these days.”
“OK, sorry to bother you.”
“No hard feelings,” he calls after me as I walk away.
Butcherman is right, of course. Without the Sioux Nation Shopping Center, people would have to drive a hundred miles to Rapid City or Chadron to get their groceries—other than Big Bat’s and the junk food you can buy with your beer in Whiteclay, there aren’t many choices on the rez; no corner produce market run by a nice Korean family, no stand-alone butcher shops, no weekend farmers’ market; no Safeway or Dean & Deluca. A couple of years back, the tribe tried to shut down the Sioux Nation Shopping Center after it was cited for food safety violations. There was a virtual uprising. People signed petitions, phoned in to complain on KILI Radio, organized a protest horse ride, put on their war paint. They seemed to be saying, “It’s not a great shopping center, but this is our shopping center—it is here, it is convenient. Many don’t have cars and those who do can’t afford the gas.”
There’s just one little problem: it isn’t their shopping center. While the name “Sioux Nation” might indicate that the tribe owns the place, in actuality, it merely licenses the rights to an outside group, collecting a fee roughly equivalent to rent. When the store opened in 1968, it was inconceivable that someone from the tribe would be competent enough to run a grocery store! To avoid mismanagement, malfeasance, embezzlement, you needed to find an outside professional grocery store management company. But today things are different, and some tribal members have suggested that the tribe should take back the license and open a new grocery store, rename it Oglala Nation Shopping Center. Hopefully, this will happen.
I stash my groceries in Villa VW’s trunk, grab my camera, and go for a stroll around the building, not caring if I might be mistaken for a nosy tourist. A large black shipping container sits behind the store on a patch of barren space, a dirt surface. In front of the container is a long table with a standing display rack of rugs and blankets, clearly not Indian made, cheap, the kind you might buy at the Oakland Coliseum flea market. I see no one nearby; it appears abandoned.
* * *
About fifty feet beyond the rug display, a young boy stands next to the open door of an old white Mitsubishi Lancer wearing a Jalen Rose Chicago Bulls shirt. I notice a hand-lettered sign on his dashboard, which reads BURRITOS & POP, $5, and I wonder, is this the Lakota equivalent of a taco truck?
I shout out, “Hi, there. What kind of burritos do you have?”
He looks up at me and says, “We got both kinds. Beans, and beans with buffalo. Two kinds of pop too, orange and grape.”
Healthy looking, at that age when baby fat is just beginning to turn into muscle, the kid is urban in his appearance: in addition to the Jalen Rose jersey, he sports jet-black spiked hair, a stud earring, sagging pants, Air Jordans. Recalling my conversation with Butcherman, I ask him, “Where do you get your meat?”
The boy shrugs, turns to ask someone sitting in the car whom I hadn’t noticed before. Must be his mom; she’s a pretty young woman, no makeup, black hair, not-quite-perfect teeth. Her skeptical dark eyes give me the once-over, lock on mine.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Just curious.”
“My husband,” she continues with decided emphasis, “buys surplus buffalos from Custer State Park. We butcher them ourselves, usually in the winter when the coat is full because my cousin is a buffalo hide painter. We boil the meat for burritos, donate leftovers to the elders or for ceremonies and powwows.”
Surprised at the preciseness of her answer, I can only say, “That’s amazing.”
“Don’t you think us Indians can be entrepreneurs?” she asks. “You surprised I know that word?”
“No, I think that’s great.”
“I went to college,” she adds.
I hand the boy five bucks, ask for a burrito with buffalo meat and beans, tell him to keep the orange soda for himself, and wander back to the front of the shopping center thinking, Here’s one boy who doesn’t have to live with his grandmother. Delicious beans obviously made from scratch, juicy meat, salsa with a kick—this burrito rocks.
Damn, who would have thought you could buy something so grubbin’ on the rez?
* * *
Away from the main drag, Pine Ridge neighbors fill their yards with the flotsam of American advertising—used Pampers, dead cars, punctured tires, and empty beer cans—until buzzards swarm like flies and carry away their unwatched children, young boys riding banana bikes through mud puddles. Bored teenagers hang about—at least they have each other—along with elders holding hands. And then there’s a busy Taco John’s, a thriving Subway sandwich shop, and churches: lovely white Sacred Heart Catholic, sturdy log-building Lakota Baptist, corrugated-metal Episcopal Mission, modern pointy-roofed Presbyterian. All reservation churches that collect substantial donations from well-meaning people all over the world who have no idea that native people have their own spiritual beliefs, “don’t need no white-man Jesus.” The priests and pastors live in tidy houses with neatly kept lawns, hedges, and thriving gardens; why should they suffer?
Regardless of who you are, however, the pace in Pine Ridge is infectiously slooooow, cars and trucks crawl along, no hurry … there is no place to go. But I can’t let myself fall into this rhythm; it is already past ten a.m., there are fifty more miles to Kyle, and I simply must stop at Wounded Knee.